Customer Reviews

Age of the Great Goddess: Ancient Roots of the Emerging Feminine Consciousness

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The late Marija Gimbutas, Professor emeritus of Archaeology at UCLA, reveals the mystery of Europes prehistoric goddess culture. Here was a culture that knew no war, where art affirmed life, and all people prospered under an egalitarian system. Professor Gimbutas uncovers the rich world of this lost culture and its sacred heritage. Documenting her ideas with a lifetime of research and discovery.

Gimbutas is gone now, so to be able to listen to her beautiful, Lithuanian accent sharing some of the very last experiences women had of living in a culture that revered The Goddess is extraordinary. In her home country, that was so when she was a girl. I met her, did a little publicity thing for her, and heard her speak three times over a two year period in the early nineties. She was a wonderful, educated, brilliant woman who came from an extraordinary family, and country, a professor emerita at UCLA, and an entertaining, warm and lovely human being. This audiotape is an extended interview with Gimbutas, who shares many, many stories of her life, and many facts and interpretations of the archaeological discoveries that are the well of her life's work. If you want to know this stuff, you can hear it from the horse's mouth. Many would have loved to have produced a slicker audiotape with a more directed format, but, they didn't, and this is what we are left with. It is a treasure.

this book is a perfect example of what I refer to as "New Age Feel Good Revisionism." It takes certain well accepted historical and archeological findings and builds a misanthropic universe of "networking" advanced matiarchs subjugated by the foul, brutal and ignorant "imperialistic" patiarchs. There is enough soft evidence of the supression of female icons in favor of their male counterparts, to lend credence to Ms. Gimbutas's assumptions. The problem is that the author tries to parley this rather soft evidence into a matriachal "Atlantis". Perhaps the worst part of her argument is that she attepts to refute her critics with emotionally based diatribes instead of scientific arguments based on accepted methods of independent verification. Her claim that the mainstream can't bring themselves to discard their entrenched ideas because of a sort of masculine based machismo is nothing but the tired old act of distraction when the evidence doesn't fit. If the author is right...the burden of proof is on her...NOT the status quo. I am waiting to be convinced.